This one has been on my to-read list for quite some time! I recently watched the animated show based on it, which sparked my interest for the book even more. Spoilers ahead.
The forest known as Farthing Wood is being overrun by humans destroying it for construction, so the animal inhabitants see no choice but to leave. They take the Oath of Mutual Protection, meaning that they'll protect and not hunt one another, and together under the leadership of Fox they start the perilous journey to their new home: a reserve known as White Deer Park.
This was a pretty good book, but I'd be lying if I said I could really get immersed in it. It is definitely good and better than the TV show, but also has a few issues I really can't get. But I will praise it for it's good pacing, intense scenes, perilous journey and having a good tonal consistency (which the show lacks).
One issue I have is that the characters are honestly pretty bland and personality-less, and just overall not very memorable. Sure, a few like Fox and Badger and Owl are a bit more distinct, but most of the animals just kind of start to blend together as they're not very unique personality or character-wise.
But there's two glaring issues that hold it back for me from enjoying it, much more than the lack of personality of the characters. One, the fact that the animals seem to have weird concepts of things they really shouldn't know about, mostly human things. One example I can think of off the top of my head is them knowing what hours or minutes are, which are obviously a human concept. Heck, they don't have watches so they wouldn't even be able to tell the time even if they did know what they were. But it just doesn't make sense. And this isn't the only example like this, there's multiple instances of these animals talking about human concepts that I severely doubt a bunch of wild animals would know about. It just really broke the immersion of the story for me.
Second, the lack of female characters. I know this isn't an issue for some readers, but for me personally it never stopped bugging me. In general animal xenofiction has a sexism problem, but this was a bit extreme. Usually there are at least some female characters present, even in the more sexist animal xenofictions, but this book almost completely lacks female characters in general. Out of the entire main cast, which is quite large, there is literally one named female character with a major role (Vixen). All other characters are male or offhand mentioned unnamed females (like the farmer's wife) who only have a few lines. Is it really that hard to just have a few female characters in your story? Why is this such a problem?
I'm sure this isn't an issue for some people and in case it isn't for you: good for you, I'm glad you can enjoy it more than I can. But the fact that Dann was too lazy to write more than one major female character just irks me a lot and despite the book itself being quite good this is something I hold against it. The animated series has many faults, but them gender-bending some of the characters for a more diverse cast was a good thing.
Finally, one more thing that kind of annoyed me (same in the TV show) but didn't break the book for me is the lack of characters that have names. You can already tell by the names I've mentioned above that the animal characters are named after their species. The fox is called Fox. The badger is called Badger. Etc. The only actually uniquely named animal character here is Whistler the heron. Which just always felt lazy to me, especially if later books have no qualms about giving characters actual names. There's characters with names like Bold and Scarface and Dash.
Which just makes it feel A) inconsistent and B) confusing. The implication with those uninspired animal names at least in the first book is that all animals are named after their species, which would be confusing because there'd be quite a few Foxes and Vixens and Badgers and Kestrels around as they're not the only ones of their species, obviously. The actually named characters I mentioned above don't show up until later books. Either way the whole lack of actual distinct names for our main cast just puts me off.
I know this review has mostly been criticisms, but genuinely, believe me when I say I did enjoy myself reading this and I do think objectively that it's a pretty good book. It's just not amazing and I personally was taken out of the experience a bit by the lack of actual character names, lack of female characters and the animals knowing of human concepts they logically wouldn't know about.
I do plan on reading the other books and covering those, by the way. Again despite my seemingly harsh review I do enjoy this book, and it is a big step up from the rather mid TV show adaptation.
Rating: 3.5/5
No comments:
Post a Comment